Thursday, July 19, 2012 -
Droughts throughout Central Asia will have a particular impact in Kyrgyzstan, with one industry website reporting on Thursday that the impoverished state will have a severe feed shortage for livestock.
“The lack of rain and unprecedented heat meant that crops began to ear too soon. Which in turn lead to harvesting beginning two weeks earlier than usual,” the Allaboutfeed.net news agency reported Aleksei Vedeneev as saying. Vedeneev heads the Association of Kyrgyz Farmers.
“But the ears didn’t have time to grow enough so the harvesters could not collect them. That means a huge portion of the crops will be lost.”
He estimates that Kyrgyzstan will lose approximately 50-70 percent of its crops.
Kyrgyzstan will have to import whatever it cannot grow, the Kyrgyz agriculture minister said.
“To ensure food security in the country, we need about 1.1 million tons of grain,” Minister Askarbek Janybekov said.
“The missing amount of wheat we are planning to import from Kazakhstan and Russia.”
Kazakhstan and Russia have also been hit by harsh weather and are each anticipating lower outputs of grain this year. However, Kazakh officials said Thursday they do not anticipate lowering the number of exported grains.